Banks make 370m euros in four months

Local banks’ profits continued to witness accelerated growth in April, despite the international financial crisis, the expensive liquidity and the high costs dealt with by branch networks, reaching around 370 million euros. In RON, the net profit went up 65% against the first four months of 2007, from 48% in Q1. The bankers believe the profit trend in the first quarter of the year has little relevance due to the different ways of distributing costs, but April confirmed the rapid growth trend, after total net profits increased 38% against April 2007. The data confirm once again that local banks are performing well amid rising interest rates and have managed to significantly increase their interest rate margin profit, without endangering their market shares. The best-positioned players are those that had a comfortable amount of cash available before the market’s visible decline in liquidity, and started competing over resources attracted from clients. Despite the rapid growth of lending, the discrepancies between the incomes of the 42 players are high, after the average profit in the banking system amounted to just 9.2 million euros at the end of April. Banking statistics do not point to banks cutting down on their extremely ambitious plans to boost their market shares – between April 2007 and April 2008 banks opened 1,090 branches (totaling 5,814), and hired 7,800 people, (totaling 67,970).